


Come What May

by Mirabai0821



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Moulin Rouge! Fusion, Alternate Universe - Theatre, Duet, F/M, Female!Christian, Male!Satine, Moulin Rouge References, Mutual Pining, Pining, Singing, Sudden onset pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-06-01 01:12:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6495004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mirabai0821/pseuds/Mirabai0821
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The director of Kirkwall University’s production of Moulin Rouge! and principal player for Satine and Cullen Rutherford’s girlfriend is out sick. Her understudy does what understudies do.</p><p>Break hearts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come What May

**Author's Note:**

> I have never actually seen Moulin Rouge or been in a play (it’s probably obvious).
> 
> My usual brand of self indulgent trash.

There were benefits to dating the staff in the theater department.

Benefits that doubled when the staff member doubled as a student.

Cullen’s not that type of guy though, the kind who would ‘sleep their way into the spotlight’. Anora was a sweet woman, and this was all a happy coincidence. Yes, she was the director of Kirkwall State’s production of Moulin Rouge. Yes, she was also the principal performer for Satine. And also yes, she chose him to play Christian.

Happy coincidences every one.

Snide comments be damned.

“I’m sorry sweetie,” she ruffled his hair and his annoyance at calling him ‘sweetie’. Yes! she’d been doing theater since 5th grade but this wasn’t his first trip across the proscenium, he needn’t be treated like a theater virgin. But when she coughed, hacking and dry, like she was trying to excise a hairball rather than some air, his annoyance softened, replaced quickly with concern. An emotion she batted away with a sharp cut of her hand.

“I’m fine sweetie, just not up for rehearsal. I’ll be better before curtain call. But in the meantime, the understudy will take my place.”

“Who? Evelyn?”

Anora shrugged, walking away from the ‘x’ marked in masking tape as the underst- _Evelyn_ took her place.

Under normal circumstances she’d be in the ensemble. Abnormal circumstances made her--

“I was thinking,” Evelyn smirked at him, interrupting his train of thought, some kind of hidden mirth hiding in the smirk at the corner of her mouth. “Can we switch?”

“Switch?” He asked.

“Switch?” Anora echoed.

“Yeah. You know Satine and Christian, and so do I. We have to. Gotta anticipate the marks, be ready to feed one another lines and such. I was thinkin’ as a thought exercise we’d switch places. I play Christian. You, Satine.”

That smirk birthed into a fully formed smile, lighting the dark brown of her eyes better than any spotlight the lighting director could employ. It intrigued him, better still, it _challenged_ him, one he was more than ready to meet.

“Okay.” He answered even as Anora unequivocally rejected it.

“C’mon Ev, you know Cullen doesn’t have the range to sing Satine! It’ll come out all awkward, off key. Besides--”

“Why not?” Evelyn questioned. “He knows what he’s doing. I mean I can imagine y’all get plenty ‘extra practice time’ anyway right?”

Anora rolled her eyes and twirled her finger, indication for the performers to find their marks and places. She didn’t say yes to this swapping arrangement, but she didn’t say no either, tacit permission as far as Evelyn was concerned.

Evelyn was his classmate in all his theater courses and even in a couple of his electives. She was a skilled performer, though it was only her dancing talents he knew of, having to skirt and skitter around her and the rest of the ensemble for most of the play.

He never heard her sing, she never had cause to assume her role as understudy.

The music cued from a pathetic wireless speaker, tinny and sharp but the only option they had available to them for the moment. They’d start using the house speakers the closer opening night approached, for now a measly two weeks away.

She stood at the opposite end of the stage from him, back turned and hunched, Christian stalking away in agony from his lover.

Him. Satine.

Assuming the new role was...odd and a little disorienting. His position on the stage, the lighting, how he held his body was all different from what he was used to, requiring him to think and react another way. He thought of turning his body to the side, head over his shoulder in imitation of Anora’s performance of Satine but it didn’t settle right with him, came off awkward, and actually unbalanced his body. To compensate then, instead of imitating Satine, parroting actions he’d seen before.

He made a new one.

Cullen was an upright (which some confused for up _tight_ ) kind of man. He liked his coffee black, he liked his dogs mabari. He wore jeans and button downs no exceptions. He went to the campus Chantry every week, no exceptions. Blonde hair, brass eyes.

Plain and ordinary.

So the plain and ordinary man made a plain and ordinary gesture. He stood up tall. He squared his shoulders.

And reached for Evelyn’s Christian, extending an open hand as though she were in reach to grab and crush to his chest.

Then he curled that open hand into a fist and pulled it back into his heart.

“Never knew…”

Le Chocolat, rather the qunari man playing Le Chocolat, quirked his one good eye, tilting his head so far that his horns almost knocked into the dancer next to him. He often joked that Cullen was the ‘vanilla’ to his Le Chocolat (in more ways than one, he was a good guy that ‘Other Boss’ but shit he could be _boring_.)

And this, what he was doing right now, could certainly be mistaken for pedestrian but at the same time it was so _him_ \--such an integral representation of himself that he somehow made into Satine as well…

“Well damn,” he whispered.

His voice floated to Evelyn at the other end of the stage. It wasn’t Anora’s thready tear-stricken whisper, but something solid, like the rest of him, strong in constitution not volume that she still heard it over the music.

She started to walk away, back still turned to Cullen’s Satine, making her way nearly off the stage. Why she chose this particular thought exercise had more to do with boredom than anything else. There was only so many times she could practice being the sick and dying damsel singing her way back into her lover’s heart.

The song sounded better on the opposite end of it anyway. Greener grasses and all that jazz.

“Come back to me and forgive _everything!_ ”

But then he hit that note, and while Anora’s sats somewhere in the higher registers fluttering softly about the ears, his note speared her lower, somewhere between her heart and her gut and made her vibrate with it.

She swung around, reacting as though she had indeed been struck, reacting as though she never heard that kind of sound come from that mouth, while the ensemble in the wings and on the stage hissed with an appreciable ‘ooo’.

“I love you. ‘Till the end of time.”

Something about that note made heat sting in his cheeks, flushing his face red and ramping his heart into a galloping frenzy. It’s acting, he knew, and it’s not like he’s never hit that kind of note before or said those words.

But those notes and those words together, like mixing vinegar and baking soda or better yet liquor and happiness, exploded in him, bubbling over making him smile without understanding _why_ when Evelyn turned around to sing back to him.

“Come what may.”

Her voice was deeper than he expected, but it was fitting, reminding him of dark skinned women in Chanter’s Robes, tambourines in their hands singing the Maker’s praises in ways he never heard before.

And she, in tone and timber, eclipsed the sound of the music from that ratty speaker but it didn’t matter. They made the music unnecessary, a distraction even. Someone kicked it off to better hear the _real_ music going on.

“Come what may.”

Her hands curled at her waist like she was trying to hold on to or hold back something before she let it all go, bending her body back, cracking her voice like a whip that stung so sharply he felt it crawl up his spine and make a home in his chest.

They crossed the stage, voices harmonized, forsaking the joyous major keys that Cullen and Anora usually sing in favor passion’s minor chords. Her eyes closed when they met, expressions on her face battling between sublime agony and torturous elation. Her hands were on his face, his around her waist. Together they sang.

_“Come what may!”_

Until the prop gun popped and they flew apart, like two lovers caught in something illicit.

“Cut!”

She couldn’t look at him. It was acting but she couldn’t bring her face to meet his anymore. Whatever that was in that moment ruined her, made her yearn for something beyond the facsimile of the scene, something she could easily name but dared not.

The imprints of her hands on his face burned long after they were gone. His racing heart slowed, almost stopped, like a car run out of gas, puttering pathetically for anything that could kick start it again, lurching to life whenever he met her eyes.

“Diamond Dogs, you’re next!” Anora coughed as the ensemble cheered, reminding Satine and Christian others were in the theater.

“You did really good.” The smile she gave him was nothing like the first one, that mischievous smirk that fit home on her face. This one drooped, the spotlight in her eyes darkened and it was gone too quickly. “Thanks for indulging me.”

“Glad for the opportunity. You were incredible.” Poor words for pathetic praise, he meant to amend them, say something to better reflect whatever he was feeling after whatever that was but-

Evelyn’s Christian turned from him, heading away as the Satine in him begged him to sing--

_Come back to me._


End file.
